BART Protesters Hardly Heard as Trains Roar By

BART trains ran on time, stations stayed open and commuters got home without any trouble on Monday as the third consecutive protest went on in the background of a weekday commute.

The inconvenienced added up to the two men arrested at Embarcadero station.

The demonstrations, loosely organized by a group calling itself Anonymous, began after July 3 when BART police shot and killed 45-year-old Charles Hill on the Civic Center platform. But their focus became confused after Anonymous, upset by a decision by BART to cut off cellphone service to thwart one protest in July, retaliated by hacking into a BART website.

At that point, supporters also began rallying against BART police for violating the protesters’ civil liberties. For two consecutive Mondays, the protests — peaking at some 200 participants on Monday, August 22, disrupted BART trains between 5 and 8:30 p.m.

On Sunday, Anonymous attempted to return the focus to Hill’s shooting and to avoid annoying commuters by asking supporters to keep the rally aboveground.

The protest started at around 5 p.m. with 50 people marching to Embarcadero station, where the two men were arrested for disturbing BART operations, a BART spokesman said. Protesters maintained that at least one of the protesters, Robert Krystof, was arrested while following what protesters had assumed were the rules — paying the fare to enter and exit the platforms, and returning to the “free speech zone” outside the fare gates when told to by police.